From what I've read on the boards the Bivos Xios is supposed to be pretty nice. Pivos actually brought one couple of the XBMC devs to help develop for it. A friend of mine at work picked one up at Micro Center, and he seems to like it.

You can use it in one of two ways, either leave Android on it and install the Pivos build of XBMC, or ditch Android for a full-on Linux CLI install that boots directly into XBMC.

Looks decent until you get into the problem of non-accelerated media playback that puts you back at software decoding. I couldn't find any info on what CPU that thing runs but it is probably similar to what you would get in any other mobile device, 1-1.5Ghz CPU. That will not cut it for any high bitrate blu-ray rips/encodes and anything with 10bit color space output. It will be dead in the water for new h.265 content as well unless some miracle of software engineering makes that stuff work on the hardware decode chips that come on embedded devices like that.

As it is, it would be awesome for a little device to use for a controlled environment where you only ever play 720P or maybe 1080P content you know is relatively 'low impact' bitrate stuff or standard 8bit mp4/h264 encoded. But then, a $60 WD-Live type box can do that (just without the pretty menus of XBMC).

Upgraded from Eden to Frodo today with my XBMCbuntu configuration. Did it the easy way with just doing an apt-get install of the binaries from the XBMC repo. It worked very well with the only problem being the artist info and images for my music collection didn't make it through. So I switched to the newer universal scraper and have been slowly updating the artist/album info.

So you think your ATV2's inability to log in to your recently upgraded computer OS is somehow the ATV's problem?

Here's a hint - check your sharing setting on your PC.

I'm not a networking expert, so I can't really diagnose what's wrong with this setup.

But the entire data drive is shared to everyone. Password protected sharing is off.There's also an additional user "xbmc" thats also included in the sharing permissions.

XBMC can't login even with the correct user/password.

Seems like you have missed an important step somewhere then. There are about 5 million windows sharing guides on websites and youtube. It should be super easy if you just follow the directions closely.

I've had an Win7 HTPC running XBMC (Eden) nice and stable for about a year now. Couple of questions for the more experienced:

1. If I'm happy with the current setup, is there any compelling reason to update to Frodo?2. If I do decide to update to Frodo, is it a relatively straightforward "in-place" update on Win7?2a. Do I need to worry about whether extensions have been updated to Frodo? Only one I really use and care about is PseudoTV.

I've had an Win7 HTPC running XBMC (Eden) nice and stable for about a year now. Couple of questions for the more experienced:

1. If I'm happy with the current setup, is there any compelling reason to update to Frodo?2. If I do decide to update to Frodo, is it a relatively straightforward "in-place" update on Win7?2a. Do I need to worry about whether extensions have been updated to Frodo? Only one I really use and care about is PseudoTV.

I have had a much more stable and feature rich experience with the latest release. The integration of a lot of features into official addons and other stuff as well as the newer skins and everything has been a big step up. I find myself using XBMC as a transparent appliance much more than I did in the past (where I was almost constantly tweaking, fiddling and resetting stuff). It now just works for me.

Not sure about the PseudoTV addon. If you have another computer you can always install the latest there and see what addons work for your needs. A lot of features have been moved into new addons and some are built in now.

I would not recommend an 'in-place' upgrade. I had some issues with crashing when trying to go from Eden to Frodo because of stuff in the library database etc. I ended up uninstalling XBMC, deleting the user data directory and installing Frodo fresh. Then put my source back (a couple folders was all) and I let the library start scanning. That was it. I had to add a bunch of addons for some custom library stuff and scraping sources but that was easy. Adding the Aeon Nox skin turned it into a joy to use.

I'm having a weird issue that I can't figure out-- every so often XBMC decides to minimize itself to the taskbar in Windows 7 for no apparent reason, requiring me to plug in a mouse and bring it back to full-screen. I've even seen it happen while watching a movie.

I once thought it was due to the Java auto-updater or even the Apple auto-update utility, but I have disabled those completely and it still happens.

Other than that it has been rock-solid, and I really love the Amazon Prime app.

I'm having a weird issue that I can't figure out-- every so often XBMC decides to minimize itself to the taskbar in Windows 7 for no apparent reason, requiring me to plug in a mouse and bring it back to full-screen. I've even seen it happen while watching a movie.

I once thought it was due to the Java auto-updater or even the Apple auto-update utility, but I have disabled those completely and it still happens.

Other than that it has been rock-solid, and I really love the Amazon Prime app.

I've had an Win7 HTPC running XBMC (Eden) nice and stable for about a year now. Couple of questions for the more experienced:

1. If I'm happy with the current setup, is there any compelling reason to update to Frodo?2. If I do decide to update to Frodo, is it a relatively straightforward "in-place" update on Win7?2a. Do I need to worry about whether extensions have been updated to Frodo? Only one I really use and care about is PseudoTV.

I have had a much more stable and feature rich experience with the latest release. The integration of a lot of features into official addons and other stuff as well as the newer skins and everything has been a big step up. I find myself using XBMC as a transparent appliance much more than I did in the past (where I was almost constantly tweaking, fiddling and resetting stuff). It now just works for me.

Not sure about the PseudoTV addon. If you have another computer you can always install the latest there and see what addons work for your needs. A lot of features have been moved into new addons and some are built in now.

I would not recommend an 'in-place' upgrade. I had some issues with crashing when trying to go from Eden to Frodo because of stuff in the library database etc. I ended up uninstalling XBMC, deleting the user data directory and installing Frodo fresh. Then put my source back (a couple folders was all) and I let the library start scanning. That was it. I had to add a bunch of addons for some custom library stuff and scraping sources but that was easy. Adding the Aeon Nox skin turned it into a joy to use.

I've never had a problem with in-place upgrades, but that's a data point of one, so there's that. You can also use a VM to play around with new installs, but that can end up being more work than it's worth. On the Linux side, I was running Frodo nightlies installed over Eden and then did a Frodo release install over the nightlies without issue. On the Windows side, I just installed in-place over Frodo without issue. You can always back up your /userdata directory (/home/.xbmc/userdata in Linux, Users\%userprofile%\AppData\Roaming\XBMC\userdata\ in Win7 and Win8, and Documents and Settings\%userprofile%\Application Data\XBMC\userdata\ in XP). I do this anyway every so often so all my settings and addons are backed up. You can also back up the Library from within XBMC.

Can't tell you about PseudoTV, as I don't use it. I didn't have any trouble with any other addons during the upgrade though.

A couple weeks ago I got a Matricom GBox MX2. Damn! Why haven't I heard of it sooner? Here I was nursing my homebrew HTPC along (a repurposed old laptop) with XBMC, analog AV outputs and cobbled together remote. For months I've been watching ebay trying to find an ATV2 for a decent price...what a waste of time. For less than $100 I can get a dedicated XBMC box that's nearly as small as a Roku and works out of the box. No need to assemble my own media boxes anymore.

The remote is a little crappy but still. Great investment. Plus it runs rooted Android so there's all those apps as well.

(I have no financial interest in the product, just expressing happiness that it exists.)

Huh, I haven't heard of that one-- it looks great though. Can you comment on the performance? Any annoying lag while scrolling through a large library? Any high-bitrate 1080p issues? Can it handle video plugins (Youtube, Apple trailers, etc.) ok?

No performance issues at all so far. No noticeable UI lag. I have a random mix different resolution media (SD, 720, 1080) on my NAS and it's played them all without problems. I've installed all the XBMCHub stuff and the plugins I use work normally (1Channel, IceFilms, Navi-X). It decodes 1080p stuff but the XBMC output is locked at 720p. Apparently the next firmware revision supports full 1080 output, FWIW. I don't particularly care either way, my stuff all looks fine.

The one thing I've seen is people report problems using WiFi. I only use wired ethernet.

Very interesting. I've only got one XBMC box right now but I'd love to replace it and add 3 more at this price. The newest version of XBMC supports live tv off of HomeRun HD, I wonder if this has any issues with that.

That sounds pretty great-- I'm currently running OpenELEC XBMC but I'd love to ditch the full-blown PC and get a little appliance instead. And it can run other Android apps as well? How would it work to switch from XBMC to Netflix to Amazon Prime?

XBMC is just another android app, so you can start and exit it as needed. You can use the Startup Manager app to autostart XBMC at boot, or set it as the default Home action (the latter method sucks because you can't exit XBMC without resetting app preferences). You can also launch android apps from the XBMC UI by going to Programs -> Android Programs.

I use a Roku for Hulu/Netflix/amazon so I don't have experience with those apps on the gbox, but I assume they work the same as any other android device.

How does the GBox handle audio formats? Any problems with regular old DTS/Dolby passthrough? (the non HD codecs.)

I'm no audio expert by any means, but I have a 5.1 system and it passes through those channels fine via HDMI once you set the output to 5.1 in XBMC. My media are all random encodings so I don't know for sure what I've tried, but they all play fine with normal-sounding audio.

I got it on Saturday and am very happy with it. I had no stuttering or audio sync problems while watching my bluray rips over the network. The remote is adequate for XBMC and I haven't taken the time to hook up my BT keyboard/mouse to it yet. It's nice because XBMC, Netflix, and the Play Store are pre-installed so all I had to do was set up my shares and let it pull metadata.

It's replacing my quad-core HTPC so the reduction in fan noise is very appreciated. I'm hoping I can set XBMC to run off a MySql database like my desktop version did because I'm planning on buying 2 more of these Matricoms.

I haven't tried it but it seems like it would be fine loading some of the emulator apps and streaming roms off the network as well.

Very happy with the purchase, thanks for mentioning it here as I had never heard of it before.

I was looking for something pretty much exactly like that when I came into this thread, but I'm not interested in 720p output, so I did a bit of searching to see what the ETA on 1080p might be, and unfortunately most of the discussion was about GPL violations. Some of that's old, and it sounds like it is possible to get the code out of them (eventually, with the license file missing in at least one case), but they're the one and only company listed on XBMC's list of GPL violators.

I haven't been looking for long, but it doesn't seem like there's a solid competitor that's out currently, just some stuff that's still in development.

Netflix previously worked on windows/OSX only, but is broken now. Bluecop's Hulu plugin used to work, but doesn't install on nightlies. Amazon broken the amazon instant video plugin when they added DRM.

You can get Netflix and Amazon through addons that launch chrome in a fullscreen mode. Works on linux too through Pipelight. It's all a bit gimpy but supposedly works.

Personally I said the hell with it, bought a roku3, and use it for netflix and amazon instant. I use XBMC for youtube, vimeo, and local video on my NAS.